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searches.
    “That’s what Pederson and Wu thought,” said Tien. “But the planetology community realized that this thesis, applied to meteorite impacts on Saturn’s moons, could explain why Enceladus is so smooth.”
    I scrolled through the results, increasingly frantic. There were several references to the Pederson and Wu paper, but they were all in the pure math realm. “There’s no sign of that connection in the database.” I felt my voice trying to crack, but clutched the remote and kept it under control.
    Nuru spoke up. “This was all happening right before final scan. We all knew about it, but it’s possible that none of the papers on the planetology connection were actually published before the database was put to bed.” She gave an apologetic little smile. “I think there was a poster session at the ASPS conference.”
    “Poster sessions don’t appear in the conference proceedings...” I began, but it was hopeless. I’d blown it. I should have dug deeper into the literature, should have asked someone else to look at my conclusions, shouldn’t have been so eager to believe I’d discovered something completely new.
    I didn’t finish my sentence. I left the remote hanging in the air, left my lunch untouched, left everyone behind me. I needed to be alone for a while.
    No one followed.

    -o0o-

    I pushed myself through the air, not really looking where I was going, glancing painfully off of panels and struts. Eventually I found myself in the airlock off of Epsilon habitation bay, near my personal space. I closed and dogged the inner hatch, then curled up into a ball, clutching my knees. I drifted, trembling.
    I could see now that I had never really fit in with the rest of the Cassiopeia crew. They were all from academic or government service backgrounds; I was the only one who’d come from industry. I’d put myself through college as a welder, then worked in the space development sector for years before going back for my doctorate at age thirty-one; they were mostly from privileged backgrounds and had been in one branch or another of space science for their entire careers. I was the only black person other than Nuru—and she was the commander, which set her apart. I was the only regular churchgoer in the bunch.
    Oh, sure, we had all bonded at first. But from here I could see the cracks that had already been developing in that bond between me and the rest of them by the time of first scan. The two years they’d worked together without me had only deepened those cracks.
    I wiped my nose on my sleeve. Okay, so I didn’t fit in. What the heck was I going to do about it?
    I might be out of sync on the technologies. I might be out of date on the science. I might be completely out of step with the rest of the crew. But I still had all the real-world skills that had earned me my position as secondary on ship systems: diagnostic, debugging, and repair skills independent of any specific technology.
    Even if my relationship with the crew was beyond repair, at least I could fix anything broken in the ship itself. And there was one thing that I already knew was broken: the communication link from Earth.
    The malfunction, whatever it was, had not stopped us from continuing our mission. With dozens of sats sending in petabytes of data every day from a whole new solar system, every one of us had more than enough fascinating work to do that the absence of news from Earth was something we could sometimes forget for days at a time. But I’d browsed through the forty-seven years of data we did have, and it just made me more curious about what had happened after that.
    “I do wonder what’s going on back home, sometimes,” Matt said when I brought up the issue during a coffee break one day. “But even if we did have the latest news, it’d be completely irrelevant to us. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up a page of headlines on the big screen. “Is this ‘Goruba Jost’ a video star, a politician, or a beach